Chi-chi Nwanoku's Chineke's All Black Orchestra Soars In Classical Music World

Chi-chi Nwanoku is a double bass player and professor of Historical Double Bass Studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She was a founder member and principal bassist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, a position she held for 30 years. The New York Times profiles Nwanoku, whose Chineke! Foundation has formed Europe's first professional all-black orchestra. 

Though Ms. Nwanoku had quickly formed a board of directors and had already selected most of her players — 62 musicians representing 31 different nationalities — she was constantly reminded that it would be hard to promote their first concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Center here in September 2015 or to even set up a website without a name.

Searching for a name for her new orchestra, the answer came to Nwanoku at 4am, causing her to bolt into a sitting position in her bed and shouting 'Chineke!' Simply stated, the word is derived from her father's Nigerian Igbo tribe and it means 'wonderful' or 'wow'. 

Chineke has been a splendid success in Europe and beyond. In May, some members aligned with the Sphinx Organization, Detroit-based and also dedicated to the development of black and Latino classical musicians, will appear with 'Chineke' in the Netherlands.

With musicians of color remaining rare in classical orchestras, Chineke's critical purpose if so inspire young people of color to pursue studies and practices in classical music. Mr. Kanneh-Mason, who last year was the first black person to win the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year award, sums up the passion orchestra members have for Nwanoku's artistic vision. “It has been inspiring to see lots of other young musicians like me,” he said. “I plan to be involved in Chineke until Chineke becomes unnecessary because eventually the aim will be for diversity to be the norm in classical music.”

These Women Playwrights Are Giving Theater A Moral Compass

Playwrights Lynn Nottage, Anna Deavere Smith, and Paula Vogel, photographed at the Cort Theatre, in New York City.Photograph by Mark Schäfer.

“I wanted to write a new play,” explains the playwright at the center of Paula Vogel’s Indecent, “that posed contemporary moral questions, that forced us to face some uncomfortable truths.” Vogel’s inventive portrayal of a 20th-century Yiddish theater troupe struggling with controversial material does just that, as do Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, for which Nottage received the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Vanity Fair profiles the trio . three gifted artists delving into oppression and loss, giving complex voices to complex issues from America's Rust Belt to a young black man's police confrontation in Baltimore. 

2017 Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Doubles Entries Of Women Artists

Editors at work at the 2016 Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon at the Museum of Modern Art. Courtesy of Marily Konstantinopoulou via Wikimedia Commons.

The fourth annual 2017 Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon happened in over 200 events held around the world in March 2017. Over 2,500 global participants edited the inclusion of over 6,500 women artists with new or expanded Wiki entries. Created after a 2011 survey confirmed that less than 10 percent of Wikipedia contributors were women, the 2017 events nearly doubled the impact of the 2016 campaign. 

“We were heartened by the response to our call to arms to fight against disinformation and fake news with facts,” Art+Feminism organizers Siân Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, McKensie Mack, and Michael Mandiberg told ArtNet News. “We continue to be inspired by all the dedicated folks who make room in their busy schedules to share skills and improve a collectively held resource like Wikipedia.”

Among the new entries in Wikipedia are Hannah Black, who called for Dana Schutz's 'Open Casket', the Emmett Till painting at the center of the 2017 Whitney Biennial controversy, to be destroyed.